Two Newsrooms, Two Ways to Cover More Public Meetings

Two newsroom workflows

Two Newsrooms, Two Ways to Cover More Public Meetings

The Piedmont Journal and The Mountain Eagle use QuorumScribe differently—and keep editorial judgment exactly where it belongs: in the newsroom.

Local newsrooms do not need another tool that tells them how to practice journalism. They need tools that adapt to the way they already work.

For one newsroom, QuorumScribe creates a strong first draft that an editor reviews, corrects and expands. For another, it produces timestamped minutes that help a reporter find what matters and write the story from scratch.

The Piedmont Journal: AI drafts, the editor decides

Chuck Jackson, publisher of the Piedmont Journal (opens in a new tab), covers multiple counties and a steady stream of public meetings, community events and breaking news. His QuorumScribe workflow is built for speed without giving up editorial control.

When a meeting video becomes available on YouTube, QuorumScribe processes it into timestamped minutes and a draft article. Chuck then edits the draft, checks names and figures, adjusts the structure and adds reporting that no transcript can provide.

I’m pleased when it picks it up within the hour. That’s been fantastic over the past week.

Chuck Jackson, publisher, Piedmont Journal (opens in a new tab)

The draft is not the finished journalism. It is a head start.

In one story, Chuck questioned a projected sales-tax figure because it did not make sense when compared with estimates from neighboring counties. He called the county administrator, could not verify the number and removed it. In another, he added information from a public-records request and reporting he had already done. He also interviews sources to add context and color beyond what was said at the meeting.

Stories showing Chuck’s editorial process

“It still takes an editor.” That is not a limitation of the workflow. It is the point.

QuorumScribe handles the first pass: organizing a long meeting, identifying its main subjects and producing readable copy. Chuck applies local knowledge, skepticism and news judgment. He can also decide that one meeting contains several stories, selecting individual topics for separate drafts instead of publishing one long recap.

The system has been tuned around his preferences, including short paragraphs for mobile readers, concise sentences and fewer subheads. As that fit improved, so did the amount of editing required.

I really didn’t change much in either of those two stories.

Chuck Jackson, on a recent pair of QuorumScribe drafts

This is QuorumScribe’s copy-editor model: the newsroom receives a usable draft quickly, while the publisher remains responsible for every editorial decision.

The Mountain Eagle: minutes and transcripts fuel original reporting

Ben Gish and The Mountain Eagle (opens in a new tab) team face a different challenge. Their coverage area includes the county fiscal court, school boards and several city councils. Some meetings overlap. Some last two or three hours. With a small staff, getting to every meeting—and then replaying recordings to reconstruct what happened—is difficult.

The Mountain Eagle is now using QuorumScribe’s transcripts and timestamped minutes every week. Instead of publishing the AI-written article drafts, its journalists use the meeting record as source material and write the finished coverage themselves.

We use the summaries and transcripts to assist us in writing stories, but we don’t use the full stories that are written by AI.

Sam Adams, journalist, The Mountain Eagle (opens in a new tab)

Topics are organized into sections and tied to specific points in the video. A reporter can scan the record, identify the decisions or debates that matter, jump to the relevant moment, verify the language and then write in the newspaper’s own voice. Sam said editing an AI-written article would take longer than writing from the minutes and transcript—a clear example of why the right level of AI depends on the newsroom and the job.

Stories Sam produced with QuorumScribe research

It’s a heck of a lot easier having something like this than going up there and sitting for two or three hours and trying to read your notes.

Ben Gish, The Mountain Eagle (opens in a new tab)

This approach preserves the reporting that happens beyond the meeting. The newsroom still verifies what was said, seeks clarification and makes follow-up calls. QuorumScribe helps its journalists get there faster by reducing the time spent hunting through a long recording.

For The Mountain Eagle, QuorumScribe acts less like an automated writer and more like a research desk: it turns hours of video into a navigable source that supports original reporting every week.

The result is broader coverage without pretending that automation and on-the-ground reporting are interchangeable.

The right amount of AI is an editorial choice

These newsrooms share the same pressure—too many important meetings and too little time—but they do not have to adopt the same workflow. In both cases, the newsroom decides what matters, checks the facts and determines what gets published.

  1. Use timestamped minutes as a grounded, searchable meeting record.
  2. Turn a full meeting into a readable summary for light editing.
  3. Create separate drafts about the individual topics a newsroom chooses to cover.

Spend less time finding the story.

The goal is not to remove the journalist from public-meeting coverage. It is to remove the hours spent finding the story before the reporting can begin.

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